Biomedical research

The report from Columbia University’s Exercise Testing Lab emphasizes not only the length of time you sit but also whether you do it without interruptions.

Building on a growing body of evidence about the dangers of the modern sedentary workplace and lifestyle, a team of researchers has found that long periods of uninterrupted sitting can lead to earlier death — regardless of how much a person exercises and even when accounting for age, gender and other factors. The survey, considered one of the largest of its kind, was published Monday in a scholarly medical journal. –Washington Times, reporting on study in The Annals of Internal Medicine (link here)

According to the study’s lead author: “most surprising findings were that it wasn’t just the total number of hours of sitting accumulated over the day, but that uninterrupted sitting over long periods such as 60 to 90 minutes, increased the risk for early death.”

Comment: That’s formulaic. But after Trump’s prior warnings and Sec. of State Tillerson’s open hand were slapped down, the US and Japan will want to act decisively in ways the North Korean regime will feel, and China will notice, but still short of war.

Thirteen people were arrested, and five were injured after more than 100 black-clad, hooded protesters with masks and weapons attacked conservative demonstrators in Berkeley. They allegedly were associated with the far-left Antifa. –Fox News

Comment: Antifa is a violent, noxious movement. The failure of Democrats to condemn it says they prefer political allies, even violent ones, over the First Amendment. Shameful.

The WSJ treats it as a business story (Gilead Sciences buys Kite Pharma), but the news for most people is why Kite is so valuable.

Kite’s main treatment, which is up for regulatory approval in the U.S. and Europe, could drastically improve treatment of patients with some of the most advanced cases of cancer.

“This technology is really going to be transformative to the field,” Gilead CEO John Milligan said in an interview.

The new breed of treatments, known as CAR-T—or chimeric antigen receptor T-cell—therapy, work by extracting a cancer patient’s T-cells, a type of immune cell. The T-cells are then genetically modified outside the body to make them more effective at hunting down and killing tumors, and then re-injected into the patient.

Several other companies also are developing CAR-T treatments—including Switzerland’s Novartis AG , which already won a key regulatory nod in the U.S. earlier this year, and is expected very soon to get the first official green light to start offering the treatment. –Wall Street Journal

The president has vowed to speed deportations and cut down on the growing backlog of cases. He issued an executive order in January calling for a national crackdown.

After Trump issued the order, the Justice Department dispatched dozens of immigration judges to detention centers across the country and hired an additional 54 judges. The agency said it has continued to hire more immigration judges each month. –Fox News

Why such an aggressive move against a white-collar suspect who is already cooperating? The NYT offers some ideas:

The search is a sign that the investigation into Mr. Manafort has broadened, and is the most significant public step investigators have taken since the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, was appointed in May. Investigators are expected to deploy a wide array of similar measures — including interviews and subpoenas — in the coming months as they move forward with the intensifying inquiry. . . .

Legal experts said that Mr. Mueller might be trying to send a message to Mr. Manafort about the severity of the investigation, and to pressure him into cooperating. –New York Times

The disease is caused by the body destroying cells in the pancreas that control blood sugar levels. The immunotherapy – tested on 27 people in the UK – also showed signs of slowing the disease, but this needs confirming in larger trials. Experts said the advance could one day free people from daily injections.

Patients given the therapy did not need to increase their dose of insulin during the trial. However, it is too soon to say this therapy stops type 1 diabetes and larger clinical trials will be needed. And further types of immunotherapy that should deliver an even stronger reaction are already underway.–BBC

Comment: Promising but larger studies needed. Note that it slows the progression of the disease; it does not reverse it.

♦♦♦♦♦♦♦

Showing a sense of historical depth, Seth Shipman and colleagues stored a picture of the first “movie” ever made, that of a horse running.

Scientists had already shown that a great deal of information can be encoded and stored in synthesized DNA. For example, Shipman’s boss, George Church, a molecular chemist and engineer at Harvard, once converted an entire book into a strand of genetic code.

“DNA has a lot of properties that are good for archival storage,” Shipman said. “It’s much more stable than silicon memory if you wanted to hold something for thousands of years.”–Los Angeles Times

What the Shipman team did was essentially a proof of concept and included only five frames. What matters is that the information for all five frames was stored perfectly and in order.

Coding five frames of a movie seemed like a perfect place to start.

The researchers began the work by breaking each frame of the film into a grid of 36 pixels by 26 pixels. Next they developed a way to code the color of each pixel using the nucleotides A, C, T and G, which are the building blocks of DNA. They also included a code that indicated where in the frame each pixel belonged. They did not encode the order of the frames, however.

“That was important to us,” Shipman said. “We wanted to see if when the bacterial DNA captures the new information, it captures it in order.” –LA Times

Then they inserted the DNA sequences into a population of bacteria cells, edited them with the CRISPR gene editing system, and inserted them into the bacteria’s genome, one DNA frame per day.

There are lots of potential uses as this technology is perfected, not only storing information but learning to read the information cells themselves collect as they develop inside the body.

The Mueller appointment has been widely applauded. The only exceptions, and they are few, are not to the person selected but to the idea of appointing a special counsel (Dan Henninger of the WSJ) or the fact that Mueller is formally under the authority of the DOJ (Nancy Pelosi). The latter point is loony. If anyone holds a whip hand, it is Mueller. If he resigns over any interference, it’s Archie Cox redux and a Constitutional Crisis.

In the short term, this lowers the temperature. Anybody who faces legal jeopardy will avoid testifying to Congress while Mueller is on the case. That leaves the stage to Comey, who wants to testify and take his revenge in public for the shabby way he was treated.

There are three larger concerns for us citizens. We need to know

We need to know the scale of Russia’s intervention in our 2016 election

We need to know about Russia’s connections, if any, with the Trump campaign

We need an expeditious investigation. It should not drag on for years. And it should not go off on tangents like the infamous Patrick Fitzgerald investigation.

◆Today in over-reaction: Talk about impeachment is not only premature, it shows a cavalier disregard for the gravity of overturning a democratic election. That should only be done if there is strong evidence of “high crimes and misdemeanors.”

It should never be done for lesser reasons: because you think Pence would be a more stable and reasonable leader, because you think Democrats would do a better job, or because you have deep (and sincere) questions about Trump’s policies or personality. He was elected President of the United States for a four-year term. Unless he committed a serious crime to win that election or has committed one since then (such as obstructing justice), or has a debilitating illness, then we live with the voters’ choice in 2016.

If large numbers of Trump supporters think he is being hounded out of office, overturning the election results, there will be hell to pay.

Short of that, the Democrats want to overturn control in both Houses in 2018. Undermining Trump and blocking Republican policies are crucial stepping stones to that goal.

◆◆◆◆

Researchers in Antarctica have discovered rapidly growing banks of mosses on the ice continent’s northern peninsula, providing striking evidence of climate change in the coldest and most remote parts of the planet.

Amid the warming of the past 50 years, the scientists found two species of moss undergoing the equivalent of growth spurts, with mosses that once grew less than 1mm a year, now growing more than 3mm a year on average. . . .

The moss growth is still modest compared to what’s happening in the Arctic, where a large-scale greening trend has even been captured by satellite. There’s so much plant growth there that scientists hope it will at least partially offset the loss of carbon from thawing permafrost beneath those plants. –New Zealand Herald

Comment: No news here, IMO. Everybody blames everybody. But the main things to notice are (a) how little of the blame is attaching to Trump and (b) how unprepared the R’s were to govern after 7 years of making this issue their top priority.

The White House Office of American Innovation, to be led by Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, will operate as its own nimble power center within the West Wing and will report directly to Trump. Viewed internally as a SWAT team of strategic consultants, the office will be staffed by former business executives and is designed to infuse fresh thinking into Washington, float above the daily political grind and create a lasting legacy for a president still searching for signature achievements. –Washington Post

Comment: Kushner, age 36 and Trump’s son-in-law, is a rising power in the White House. Taking on an arteriosclerotic bureaucracy, where almost everyone has civil-service protections, will be an enormous challenge.

Ms. Merkel is seeking a fourth term in national elections on Sept. 24, a race that has grown more challenging in recent weeks after her center-left rivals, the Social Democrats, unanimously selected a new candidate, Martin Schulz, to lead them into the fight. –New York Times

Comment: Merkel’s long tenure as German leader has lent stability to Europe and the EU.

The accident occurred when the driver of a second vehicle “failed to yield” to the Uber vehicle while making a turn, said Josie Montenegro, a spokeswoman for the Tempe Police Department.

“The vehicles collided, causing the autonomous vehicle to roll onto its side,” she said in an email. “There were no serious injuries.” –CNBC

Comment: Sounds like the Uber vehicles did not initiate the crashes, and it is unclear to me whether better tech and programming could have avoided them. That, I assume, is what Uber wants to figure out.

Current bioengineering techniques, like 3-D printing, can’t build the intricate, branching network of blood vessels that makes up the heart tissue. However, a team of researchers from the Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), University of Wisconsin-Madison and Arkansas Sate University-Jonesboro have successfully turned to plants. –Science Alert

OBAMA: Relative to Corbyn or relative to some of the Republicans. (CNN transcript)

◆ The great Thomas Sowell writes his goodbye column.It is here.At 86, he wants to spend more time with his photography, less with public affairs. For decades, he has been a trenchant and wise observer.

Comment: My initial judgment is that Pres. Obama’s move will have a major impact on the political alignment of Jews. It will reinforcement the movement, which began under Obama, of the Democratic Party siding with the anti-Israeli left in the US and Europe, and that, in turn, will accelerate the movement of non-secular US Jews away from the Democrats and toward the Republicans.

The fact that Democrats are even considering Rep. Keith Ellison, a former follower of Louis Farrakhan and still a speaker at events aimed at delegitimating Israel, is another blow to the decades-long connection between Jews and the Democratic Party.

Obama’s move will also deepen the division among Jews, pitting the secular, social-justice left, which has little interest in Israel and is deeply critical of its security and settlement policies, and the more traditional, observant community, which sees a rising global threat to Jews and believes Israel is a Jewish homeland under threat from radical Islam and a hostile global left, centered in Europe and US universities.

Bottom Line:Obama’s move harms Israel and harms the Democratic Party. Like so many of Obama’s policies over the past eight years, it is a political mistake that will cost his party for years to come.